Controllerless Networks

Hi everyone,

I am a tehnology specialist at a school district and we have recently deployed two aruba instant 105's. We are trying to figure out how to set up seperate ssid's so we can have 3 different ssids for each building but do not want to broadcast the 3 ssids in each building. Is this possible with the aruba 105s and the virtual controller configuration?

The first quesiton I would have is why are you doing it this way and what is it that you are trying to acomplish? You can surely do this by seperating the IAPs into two seperate virtual controllers, but I'd rather find out what you're doing and see if there is a cleaner way to handle it. 

-awl

The reason that we want seperate ssids is because we consistantly have our passphrases compromised by teachers/staff sharing them with students or sharing with unwanted users. When this happens we have to change passphrases and re-add them to each teacher laptop, and each one of our portable labs which is a huge damper on our time. We are the only people who are supposed to know the passphrase and add users accordingly. 

The other reason is because all of our student computers are locked down with a product called smart control and to change each one of those computers would require us to unlock everyone of them and reload the passphrase, probably 500 computers or so. So it would be nice to keep our current ssid configuration.

Sounds like what you really need to do is move to RADIUS and 802.1X. Do you have AD accounts for everyone?

-awl

That sounds creative, yes every student has an active directory account and staff also, What is the most efficent way and how would you go about implementing this?

It takes a bit of doing initially, but it's fairly straight forward. You'll need to switch from PSK to using 802.1X with the RADIUS server as your authenticator. Then each user can use their AD credentials to authenticate to the network. The setup is covered in the user guide, but it is also available in the SSID configuraiton wizard.

-awl